


the man he became

by slambam



Series: perception [2]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Ben-Hassrath, Character Study, Dragon Age Quest: Demands of the Qun (Inquisition), F/M, Post-Demands of the Qun, Qunari, character study that got WAY out of hand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-22
Packaged: 2018-05-28 08:50:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6322876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slambam/pseuds/slambam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>In those moments of uncertainty, he wanted nothing more than for the Qun to speak to him as it had before Orlais, before Seheron. He knew it couldn’t - there were depths in his mind, gouged in by Seheron and unmended by reeducation, that the verses he’d relied on could no longer penetrate, and he found that too often his faith failed to bridge the growing gap between the philosophy of his youth and the truth of his experience.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	the man he became

**Author's Note:**

> another kind of exploration of Bull, sort of following on the heels of my last one - this time looking specifically at Iron Bull's changing mindset over time.

Bull had been expecting a report from one of his informants before he, the Chargers, and the Inquisitor left for the Storm Coast. Even after they returned to Skyhold, the body-shaking explosion of the Dreadnought still raw in his mind, he continued to wait. A sick, stupid part of him he couldn’t silence hoped a message come, telling him that the happening was a planned deception, the offer of an alliance only bait, and that he was still a part of the Qun. The message never came, of course. The assassins did instead, and in that he had his answer.

In those early days in Orlais, after Seheron and his reeducation, The Iron Bull had just been a convenient cloak to hide his true loyalties as Hissrad. It was a simplification of his own personality - or what it had been before the last few months leading up to his reeducation - tailored to be palatable to the mercenaries he folded himself in with, a company called Fisher's Bleeder's. They liked a man who was good at hitting things, who liked drinks and bloody battles and good company, and he could be that man. He didn’t dislike fighting and drinking, and the battles came easier than he thought they would, even if he sometimes lay sleepless at night wondering if his mind had gone too far in the heat of the fight. It was almost effortless, but when he wrote his reports late at night the persona of The Iron Bull sloughed off like he’d never put it on in the first place. He was a good agent. He was loyal. He would not lose himself again.

For a while, the two selves worked in tandem - The Iron Bull drank, and Hissrad listened with a keen ear to the ramblings of drunks, picking out what was important. The Iron Bull fought in the jobs he was given, and Hissrad reported back on the dealings of the Orlesian nobility, how power shifted and who was feuding with whom. Bull flirted with serving girls, and Hissrad won their hearts not for the physical, but so they would perch in his lap and tell him in a giggling whisper what the shadowy man across the room was talking to his companion about.

When he left Fisher’s crew, years later, it was for tactical reasons. That’s what he told the Ben-Hassrath, anyway. He took with him a small handful of Fisher’s best who had accepted him a leader - as one of their own, and suddenly, he was Iron Bull - the mercenary captain. The position felt natural, gave him more control over his circumstances. He had opportunity to deal directly with the people in power – nobles, merchants, and the lords of the underground. It furthered his aims. It worked.

The Iron Bull, though, did it because that handful of mercenaries could make him roar with laughter night after night, and because it was a damn shame to see Fisher waste their talents the way he did, recklessly endangering them to prove a point. The parts of him, ever-growing, that were Iron Bull had just as much influence on the decision as the parts of him that were Hissrad. He tried not to dwell on the realization, but at the same time, each time he sat down to write his reports The Iron Bull was harder and harder to set aside.

He found he could no longer justify reducing all the people he’d encountered, for all their passions and flaws and intricacies, to a single category: _bas_ . He had believed it in Seheron, that people outside the Qun were without purpose or direction, worthy of no greater title than _bas_ until they accepted the right path. In Seheron, that belief had been a matter of survival, of self-preservation, to justify the death all around, but now he couldn't be sure. In those moments of uncertainty, he wanted nothing more than for the Qun to speak to him as it had before Orlais, before Seheron. He knew it couldn’t - there were depths in his mind, gouged in by Seheron and unmended by reeducation, that the verses he’d relied on could no longer penetrate, and he found that too often his faith failed to bridge the growing gap between the philosophy of his youth and the truth of his experience.

The line between his two selves blurred with each passing month, and eventually he settled fully into the life he’d built for himself as the Iron Bull. At every turn, he took in as much as he could, fighting what there was to be fought and living all the life there was to live. He cared, deeply - about his men, about the people around him, and he found with the Chargers a family like he hadn’t had in years. More than the reeducators, they made him real, aware of himself as more than just a fine tool, a weapon. Though they were few and far between, there were moments, terrifying moments, where he felt himself on the edge of morality, of faith, of his mind. Then, he fell back on the knowledge that he was still Hissrad somewhere, that the Qun held him in check. It was in his control. He told himself that if he was called back to Par Vollen he’d leave it all behind without a moment's hesitation, but he knew it was a lie. He dreaded the thought that that day might come.

\---

The order to join the Inquisition was the first direct, objective order he’d had in more than a year, and he paused with the missive in his hand, shocked back into remembrance. His ties to the Ben-Hassrath had been based purely in exchange of information for so long that to see a command brought a bittersweet sense of duty that he, after a moment’s hesitation, embraced. Hissrad returned to the forefront, although at first Hissrad seemed more of a fabricated identity than the Iron Bull. As he and the Chargers traveled to the Storm Coast, Krem breaking from the company to travel to Haven, Bull tried to carve himself back into a shape he’d almost forgotten. He tried to feel ashamed about how far he’d strayed, but the person he’d become, The Iron Bull, the false Tal-Vashoth, wasn’t a bad man. Inadequate, by the standards of the Qun, but not a bad man. Still, he let old loyalties and disciplines flood into the core of him, letting himself be driven onward by duty, and tried to remembered who he was meant to be.

The Herald hired him in with no trouble, after a few curt questions and hard stares with her steely eyes, barely reacting to the fact that he was Ben-Hassrath. Easy enough. From there, fitting in with The Inquisition was just another game, a puzzle for him to solve. He’d debated revealing his status as a spy, but from what he knew of their spymaster, she would reveal him if he didn’t. It wouldn’t matter that they knew. He could work it so that they didn’t care. Some of them were easy - the Orlesian enchanter, especially. She wanted him brutish and submissive, and it was easy enough to play the part. Varric was fixated on the spying, but only so far as his writing - so he tailored his interactions with the dwarf to fit those interests. For Cassandra - he actually enjoyed his ruse for her, the flattery and flirtation and compliments. It was only half deception. For her part, the Herald didn’t seem to want anything from him, but then again she didn’t seem to want anything from anyone besides that they do their jobs and do them well. That much he could oblige her.

He bent his persona to the expectations of the Inquisition, but the part of him that was Iron Bull didn’t let him bend completely. He couldn’t play a mindless devotee to the Qun, as the apostate Solas so wanted him to be. He could no longer force that old dogma to come into words from his throat. He believed in the philosophy of the Qun, the solace it offered for those who wanted it, but he’d seen the cost of spreading the Qun in places that did not want it. It wasn’t something he would wish for any place in Thedas, no matter the final reward.

Over time, he folded in, as he always had, and his deceptions once again became his reality. They were his friends, the Inquisition, as much as his Chargers were. Their victories became his, and he shared the pains of their losses. After the Breach was closed Bull’s joy took the forefront, the kind of joy that comes with sheer, hard-won victory, to see the happiness and relief on all those tired faces he’d come to know so well.

That night, as Haven burned, he felt grief through the adrenaline, and as the Herald offered herself as a sacrifice to save the others, an odd anger bubbled up in his torso. The Inquisition needed her and her mark, and her death would only serve to further the chaos. That was Hissrad’s anger, objective, and he had no patience for it. The deeper anger was more deeply Bull’s - Adaar was a good woman, one he’d come to respect, shit, he’d even come to like, and the thought of never seeing her again made his blood boil even as despair opened a pit in his stomach. To Hissrad, she was a tool too valuable to lose, but to Bull, she was valuable beyond words, as a leader, as a person. Losing her now was unfathomable, but he was powerless to say anything against it, paralyzed by the Ben-Hassrath imperative to maintain distance.

As they stepped through the Chantry doors, she paused, and as she caught his eye he knew from her expression she’d seen the regret in his eyes. To his surprise it rose in hers, too, but only for a moment before she turned and pushed through the door.

\--

At Skyhold, after the Herald’s appointment as Inquisitor, Hissrad was still a part of Bull, as he had always been. But, in the face of everything that had happened - in the face of Corypheus and the assassination plot, the machinations of Calpurnia and the Venatori - he felt that the Iron Bull was needed to aid in the Inquisition efforts more than Hissrad was needed to send reports back to Par Vollen. He might have been there to spy, but this was bigger than anything he or the Ben-Hassrath could have anticipated. His reports left quickly, as new information poured in, but it was only as he wrote them that he was truly Hissrad anymore, and even then, it felt like going through the motions. Those parts of him slipped away, slowly, and it wasn’t until he held the letter that offered an alliance with the Qunari that it all came crashing back.

And then, on the day where the alliance hung in the balance – where his own allegiance to the Qun hung in the balance -  he signaled for the Chargers to fall back.

He watched as Gatt walked away, flinched as the Dreadnought exploded. He had never been one to worry over a choice. What was done was done, but that didn’t stop a pang of hollowing, half-felt regret.

Around their campfire, late that night, he sat alone. Most of the Chargers respected his need for time rather than company, and even Krem had returned to his tent for the night, leaving Bull alone.

It had taken Gatt’s words to solidify it in his mind, but the realization that he had become more Bull than Hissrad had been there for some time. The Inquisitor, too, had made it apparent - _his name is Iron Bull,_ she said, with a resolve that would have knocked a lesser man than Gatt off his feet. He appreciated it, in the moment. It grounded him, but the reaffirming of his name didn’t make his new status any easier to swallow.

_Tal-Vashoth._

A hand, firm on his shoulder, pulled him from the dark maelstrom of his thoughts, and he looked back to see Adaar, her face set and impassive, as usual. In the firelight, her eyes looked slightly softer.

“You did the right thing.” She spoke quietly, but there was an assuredness in her voice that left him momentarily without words.

“Thanks, Boss.” He replied, his own voice low, tired. She nodded, meeting his eye, then lifted her hand. In a few footsteps and a whisper of canvas she was gone into her tent, and for an odd moment, all he wanted was to follow and extend the contact. Hissrad would have never felt that, he thought. Not about a Vashoth. An ache tightened his chest. How long had it been, that he had stopped pretending to be The Iron Bull and started pretending to be Hissrad?

After Gatt's visit to Skyhold and the assassins, the voice of Par Vollen in his life went silent, and with its absence, he found not much changed. He was The Iron Bull, and he had been for years. The part of him that was Hissrad was still there – it always would be. It and the ghosts of Seheron had made their impressions on his psyche, and there was no escaping them. He would still have to assure himself that the kindnesses he offered were not an unconscious means of manipulation to get what he wanted, that he wasn’t just using the people he cared about. He could no longer hold on to the hope that he could go back to the Qun, be Hissrad again, but with that gone came a freedom that was almost frightening. All he could do was move forward, and he could no longer ignore that in that path was the Inquisitor.

She’d changed immensely since Haven. She smiled - small ones, smaller than they should have been - but they were still smiles. She even laughed once in a while. He’d done his part to nudge her towards the person she could be - for the sake of stability, he’d justified as Hissrad, but the Iron Bull did it because she deserved to feel whole. He knew how she felt - he saw it in her posture, in her eyes at the end of the day. He’d felt it too. It was there in her name: weapon. She was so used to feeling like a thing, a weapon, and he had spent years feeling the same way. In Par Vollen, he’d had Tamassrans, in Orlais, the Chargers, and now, here - she had him. He did what he could to remind her that she was more than an object of utility - a touch on the shoulder, calling her over to drink with his crew when he noticed her hesitating at the door of Herald’s rest - and was surprised when she began to return the favor at the end of long days where old tension knotted his muscles, mind clouded by the battles of the past.

Where there had been fear and guilt in her eyes there was now a burning, relentless determination, but in some quiet moments, across the room in an emptying tavern or over a dying campfire, he caught her watching him, a quiet unease in her eyes. There was a curiosity there, a hunger he recognized, but also a hesitation, a resignation to inaction. They had become something like friends, if there could be a name put to it, but she knew of his allegiances and the distance that mandated. The look in her eyes said she knew better than to act on her desires, but to him, it seemed she almost didn’t know how.

Before the events on the Storm Coast, he had been divided. The Iron Bull saw her strain under the pressure of leadership, as determined as she was, and wanted to sate the quiet desire in her eyes, to awaken it completely, to see her come undone under his hands, but she was the Inquisitor, a mage, and a Vashoth, and to connect that intimately with her was a risk Hissrad could not take, as much as the Iron Bull wanted to help. 

Now, with his ties to the Ben-Hassrath severed, it was the Iron Bull who sat on Adaar’s bed, in her quarters, waiting for her to arrive, and it was the Iron Bull who could finally acknowledge that he cared enough to give her what she needed. As her footfalls sounded on the stone steps, he braced himself. 

She took a few steps into the room, apparently unaware of his presence before he shifted on the bed. That caught her attention. She looked up sharply, brows furrowed in confusion, and locked her gaze on his as he began to speak.

“So, listen. I’ve caught the hints. I get what you’re saying. You want to ride the Bull.”

It came out like he’d planned it. Her expression changed, subtly, and that told him all he needed to know. Tension he didn’t realize was there faded as relief swept over him, and he couldn’t keep the small smirk from his face. She watched as he pushed himself up, the resignation he’d so often seen in her eyes replaced by an uncertain but breathless anticipation.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
